Kunkle gets life for killing ex-boyfriend

Thursday

Jun 21, 2007 at 12:01 AM

Cheryl Kunkle was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison without parole after a jury in February convicted her of fatally beating her ex-boyfriend, Benjamin Amato, in his Brodheadsville home in November 2001.

ANDREW SCOTT

STROUDSBURG — Cheryl Kunkle stood Wednesday in Monroe County Court, shifting impatiently from one foot to the other and seemingly showing no remorse as the judge told her why he was sentencing her to life in prison without parole for the first-degree murder of her ex-boyfriend, Benjamin Amato.

"For a life to be snuffed out with such brutality and lack of concern is hard to understand," county President Judge Ronald Vican told Kunkle, who at one point looked away with a scoffing, dismissive expression on her face.

A jury in February convicted Kunkle of planning to kill Amato, waiting for him in his Brodheadsville home, spraying him in the face with pepper spray when he arrived and then beating him with a blunt object believed to be a baseball bat.

After he had not been seen or heard from for several days, Amato was found Nov. 16, 2001, lying dead with a fractured skull in a pool of blood, police said.

Kunkle killed him to get him out of the lives of herself and their son, Jonathan, now 8, following a custody battle, prosecutors said.

"The prison you will be transferred to will have a lot of prisoners just like you," Amato's stepdaughter, Peggy Bohmann, told Kunkle just before the sentence was read.

"When you look into those many evil eyes, may you finally see what my stepfather saw just before he took his last breath."

Bohmann's tearful sister, Erin Guth, said, "Last Sunday was Father's Day and, instead of taking my dad to dinner or having him over for a barbecue, I was sitting at a grave, telling him, 'Happy Father's Day,' and kissing a cold picture on a headstone.

"What (Kunkle) did is unforgivable and she needs to go to jail for the rest of her life," Guth said, recalling Amato as a kind, gentle, fun-loving man.

"Maybe she will realize what she did when she has to explain to Jonathan why his father is not alive anymore. He didn't deserve to die so horribly. No one deserves that."

Following her conviction, Kunkle gave a statement in a pre-sentencing investigation report saying Amato "accidentally fell down the steps and died," according to what the judge read in court Wednesday.

"Anyone who believes that is delusional," Vican said. "This man was brutally murdered. What's also unbelievable is that (Kunkle) attributes the amount of blood spatter found at the scene to a police conspiracy to frame her."

On her way into court for sentencing, when asked how she feels about likely spending the rest of her life in prison, Kunkle said, "I don't intend to."

On her way out afterward, she said she plans to appeal and "bring out certain issues in the next few months." She was accompanied by defense attorney David Skutnik, who replaces trial attorney Brett Riegel.

During the trial, District Attorney David Christine and Assistant District Attorney Michael Mancuso presented the following key points of evidence:

Kunkle filed a harassment complaint against Amato, which Brodheadsville Magisterial District Judge Debby York dismissed in July 2001 due to insufficient evidence. Kunkle then asked, "What do I have to do, kill him to get him to leave me alone?" Kunkle in August 2001 tried to hire April Steinhauser, who has a child by Kunkle's brother, and Steinhauser's boyfriend at the time, Nathaniel Evans, to kill Amato.

That plan fell through when the couple, both cocaine users, took money Kunkle paid them, with no intention of killing anyone, and then stole a safe from her home. Some of the money eventually was returned, and Kunkle decided not to press charges.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Amato told friends he feared for his life. On Nov. 12, 2001, Kunkle drove to Amato's home and told her son from a prior relationship, Gregory Rowe, then 15, to wait for her in a nearby location and then pick her back up at the house an hour later. When Rowe picked her up, she changed her clothes in the back seat, tossing the old clothes out the window. Those clothes, along with a baseball bat believed to be the murder weapon, later were found and disposed of.

Rowe is now serving his own life-without-parole sentence for killing his ex-girlfriend and their 7-month-old daughter in their Pike County home in May 2004.

On Nov. 20, 2001, four days after Amato was found dead, police executed a search warrant at Kunkle's Tobyhanna home, after which she told Rowe she had killed Amato and threatened the teen into keeping silent. On Nov. 21, 2001, Kunkle implicated herself to two more people. Those two others were Martin Reynolds, a married Pocono Mountain Regional Police officer who was dating her, and Gerry Terlesky, a mason who worked for her father. Police in July 2003 had found enough evidence against Kunkle to charge her with solicitation to commit murder, but found further evidence in late 2005 to charge her with doing the job herself. This was due mainly to statements from Rowe and Terlesky and later Reynolds, who resigned as a police officer.

The defense raised the following key points:

Kunkle said she made some regrettable statements out of anger and frustration, statements which could have been interpreted as her wanting to harm Amato. The prosecution's case was based more on questionable testimony from less-than-upstanding witnesses than on forensic evidence, which did not conclusively tie Kunkle to the murder. If Kunkle killed Amato, her clothes would have been bloody. If she changed those clothes in the back seat of her vehicle as Rowe was driving her away from the scene, there would have been blood in the vehicle, but none was found. Kunkle said she never hired anyone to commit any murder.

She said she lent Steinhauser money as a favor and then discovered her safe had been stolen from her home. She said Steinhauser and Evans then concocted a murder-for-hire story to use against her should she ever press charges against them for the theft.

The prosecution said the child custody case was at least part of the motive for Kunkle killing Amato. But if that was the case, why was there no evidence of a bitter custody dispute? And why was Amato eventually allowed unsupervised visits with their son?

"The jury fairly determined that pure evil exists in this woman," Christine said after Wednesday's sentencing. "No amount of time is too much for her to serve. We will vigorously oppose any appeal she files."

State Police Cpl. Shawn Williams of the Hazleton barracks, the lead investigator in the case, said, "We're satisfied with the outcome. It's long overdue.

"Ms. Kunkle's claims that we framed her are obviously the ludicrous, desperate comments of someone going away to prison forever, but those comments don't surprise me," Williams said.

Guth said, "Justice has been served, but it won't bring (Amato) back."